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#RiseOfTheBadger: The Set Up

Good Day one and all, welcome back to #RiseOfTheBadger. Firstly let me thank you for coming and taking a look at my blog. Now you have had a little introduction as to why we are doing this and who “HoneyBadger” is, I would like to briefly go over some of the requirements for this streaming adventure.

The Streaming Platform

There are a number of options out there for the modern day streamer. Youtube, Facebook, Twitch, Mixer and possibly more. Myself, I chose Twitch. there’s no deep and meaningful reason for this and I wouldn’t necessarily say that it’s better than any other service, but Twitch is the platform that I am sort of familiar with. Over the years I have dabbled on and off with streaming so my account was already set up and waiting to go.

Taking a quick gander around the options on twitch, I found that you could alter your home page. Underneath the video of the stream, Twitch gives you a little area that you can customise. With the ability to add panels and components. After a little tweaking I managed to get something that actually looks quite smart. Consisting of links to social media accounts, information about “The badger”, a top clips section that changes to the clip with the highest amount of views and even a link to a donations badge- more about that later as I accidentally stumbled on something called streamlabs that integrates with twitch and my streaming software- a wonderful find!

The Hardware

The reason I have never delved into streaming regularly is due to performance. Pc specifications and internet upload speed play an important factor in how well its going to work. I believe that some of the more professional full time streamers even utilise separate PCs for encoding their stream. I’ve never been in that place where streaming hasn’t had an adverse affect on the gaming performance. However, in the past year, I have upgraded my PC which now seems to have the ability of offering a nice smooth streaming experience. So without further a do, let me show you the Specification:

CPU: Ryzen 1600

MotherBoard: Gigbabtye AORUS AX370-Gaming K5

Ram: 16gb DDR4 3000mhz Corsair Vengeance

Graphics Card: MSI Geforce GTX 980TI 6GB

Hardives:

500gb Samsung SSD

1 TB Samsung HDD

Monitors:

Lenovo 2560×1440

Samsung 1920 x 1080

Vr Headset: Lenovo Explorer

Streaming Software

In order to stream, one needs a medium in which this can be carried out. A piece of software that takes that gameplay and sends it out there into the world. Over the years I have used many pieces of software for recording to hard-drive and saving mad moments of gameplay. Programs such as fraps, nvidias shadowplay and I’ve played about with OBS a little. When I upgraded to my motherboard though, I was also given a free years supply of Xsplit, so Xsplit is the go to broadcaster for me.

At first, I found the software a little daunting, but searching through google soon led me onto the answers I needed and it was relatively easy to suss out. You have to create a scene and add sources to that scene. Most importantly of course was the game play that needed streaming, followed by the webcam feed, audios sources and the Twitch chat integration. For myself I consider twitch chat overlay as an important integral part of the set up. The software is on my second screen and through that I can see if anyone is chatting without having to actually be in the chatroom on my Twitch site.

To enable Xsplit to stream to Twitch, Facebook or You tube, it’s incredibly straightforward. All you have to do is hit that broadcaster tab and authorise the program, allowing it to stream to your streaming agent of choice. Of course there are more settings, many more settings which you can play about with. The main ones being Bit rate and resolution which have an affect on the quality of your stream. I think I eventually settled on 1280 x 720 @ 60fps using a 4000kps bitrate. I’m not going to go into all these settings here, as I’m not trying to give a guide, just merely give an idea of the set up.

Streamlabs.

Streamlabs was something I had never heard of until after I started my first week of streaming. I seemed to have just stumbled upon it! I’m not entirely sure how to be honest. I think it was something to do with unlocking an achievement in Twitch for either streaming for a few hours, or getting a few followers. Whatever happened, I somehow found it and it’s marvellous.

Streamlabs allowed me to set up alerts whilst live streaming. It integrates with Xsplit and Twitch so that when you are followed during a streaming session it will pop up with a notification on the stream. It offers the same notifications for donations and subscriptions. After watching a few of the more popular streamers, I had wondered how this was done, I had even searched for it in options on twitch and xsplit to no avail. The missing link was streamlabs. Within streamlabs you can also link to your paypal account so that you can set up a donations page just in case anyone out there is feeling a little generous!

The icing on the cake though….Well there’s a wonderful place within Streamlabs called the Merchandise store! This opens up a whole world of creations. You can start up your own clothing line,mugs, mousemats and phone cases to name a few. All you have to do is upload the artwork, they print it and send it out to the customer. What else could you possibly want out of life. Soon the whole world will be wearing T shirts and hoodies with the HoneyBadgers face plastered all over them. Who wouldn’t want that right!

All of the above mounts to just about everything that is needed to get yourself out there streaming. Although it is also helpful to have a some sort of basic knowledge in graphic design and video editing for creating clips. Nowadays there are plenty of apps on both android and IOS that can help you whip up logos and backgrounds in a few minutes on your phone, even with a limited skill set in this area. There are also plenty of free video editing programs for windows that allow you to knock up some highlight clips.

#RiseOfTheBadger

So now you know the why, the who and the how. In the next blog post you will follow “Honeybadger” as he throws himself to the wolves and enters the world of online streaming. So stay tuned, follow the blog and look out for the next episode of #RiseOfTheBadger